Peace Is A Drug For Slaves

Skies everywhere will soon darken and stay darker for some time.
The earth's average temperature will go down at least half a degree
from a smoky pall that is spreading across the globe from the
oil fires in Kuwait.

Because oil prices had to go above $20 a barrel but stay below
$25, a certain amount of oil had to go off the world market; not
too little, not too much. The simplest way to get rid of this
oil was to burn it. The simplest way to burn it was to have a
war.

These are dangerous times. Both Iraq and Kuwait are smoking ruins.
Things are going very well for America. It has shown itself as
a powerful but delicate machine. Things must go well for it. If
things go badly, the system starts falling apart into a bad horror
movie of depression, war and homelessness.

The delicate balance is between oil at $20 a barrel and oil at
$25.

In Los Angeles, 10 million workers must drive two hours a day
to get to work. The price of gas has to stay low enough to let
them commute or the American Dream begins to collapse. If commuting
costs too much, the car stops looking like a dream machine and
starts looking like a mechanical monster. Only by using oil now
can we sell our time to buy back our survival. The price of oil
is the price of simulated happiness. It has to stay low enough
to let some people think happiness will come from their VCRs and
their minivans.

In Texas, when oil prices went below 20 dollars a barrel a few
years back, the economy began to collapse. It brought the U.S.
real estate market and banking system with it. For a few years,
our economy has been in a financial afterlife. The money missing
from failed savings and loans was temporarily covered by the government
but this further destabilized the world and the economy.

The Fix

Extreme measures were needed to create "lasting peace and
prosperity." War continued peace through different means.
The information system found a total cartoon war victory. There
were no casualties. The enemy army collapsed and begged forgiveness.
TV ratings and consumer confidence were raised by violent measures.

It had been announced that lies and press censorship would be
used to make certain Operation Desert Storm looked good. But it
turned out the military didn't need to censor the news. It won
a perfect victory. Was this victory perhaps too perfect?

Can we know for certain whether the last nine months' melodrama
was live or preplanned? The media corporations control what most
people hear so perfectly that the spectacle no longer bothers
to tie up the loose ends. It states its strategy openly to anyone
who reads the fine print.

While it organizes victory parades for the patsies, the information
system admits in its "sophisticated channels" that it
effectively set up the whole Persian Gulf Crisis. The Washington
Post let out the first part of the set-up: the U.S. government
quietly pushed Hussein to go into Kuwait. U.S. Ambassador April
Glasspie told Saddam Hussein that his dispute with Kuwait was
an Arab to Arab affair. She said also "We have many Americans
who would like to see the price of oil go above $25 because they
come from oil-producing states."

Does it matter that high circles of the U.S. government provoked
the recent war for their own reasons and for their own benefits?
There were, on both sides, at most 400 decision makers controlling
the whole struggle. All the cards were held by the heads of the
networks, Bush, Hussein and their generals, the Emir of Kuwait,
and the heads of a few other countries. If you think about it,
this by itself says a lot about the state of this present society.

But the deception system of the war machine is important because
it became the management system for the whole society. CNN brags
that it won the Gulf War by piping Pentagon supplied disinformation
into Saddam Hussein's living room. If that is true, we all received
the same calculated disinformation as Hussein (more on that later.)
The war/information machine attacked everyone at once.

The complete fix only makes sense when you look at the environment
that the U.S. was operating in. The U.S. held all the cards from
the beginning. Iraq is a remote-controlled industrialized society
living only on oil revenues. Hussein was a dictator installed
by the CIA and always operating on a short leash. He is as brutal
and short-sighted as the average U.S. client dictator or used
car dealer. He had already proved his loyalty to his Western World
bosses when he invaded Iran and fought an eight-year war to protect
the oil kingdoms of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

A strong gang can control a weaker gang. This basic principle
of gangland is well know to even those who claim to be innocent
and idealistic. If there is any doubt, the CIA has made this principle
into a science and studied it in many advanced seminars. As the
former head of the CIA, Bush was thus Hussein's godfather.

Hussein was set up to take a big fall. His narrow-mindedness made
him easily manageable. At the time of the invasion, Kuwait had
lowered the price of oil while demanding that Hussein repay his
debts. Saddam took April Glasspie's bait and invaded Kuwait, thinking
that the U.S. also wanted higher oil prices. Hussein didn't realize
that for the U.S., a war with Iraq would be an even easier way
to raise prices and keep U.S. control.

The second stage of the set-up was even simpler. The Emir of Kuwait
has $3 billion in U.S. banks alone. Once Hussein invaded, the
Emir was more effective than even Bush in getting the whole world
behind the military build-up. While he probably wasn't in on a
scheme to invade his own country, his reactions and his influence
could be easily calculated into such a scheme.

Peace Criminals

There are really a vast number of imaginable reasons for provoking
this war: to give Americans a new enemy, to control oil prices,
to give the U.S. a permanent military base in the Persian Gulf,
to teach other nations a lesson, to make money for the Pentagon,
to eliminate all talk of the "peace dividend," to distract
the average person from the misery of work and shopping, to militarize
society for continuation of the drug war.

While different groups of managers, stockholders and journalists
were carried along for different reasons, only a few big players
needed to see the whole plan from the beginning. (We speculate
here that boss Bush himself supported this scheme with the goal
of controlling oil prices since he comes from the Texas oil faction
of capitalists.)

Only a few people had to see the total strategy because the system
is nearly perfect. The routine of daily life in America, from
work to advertising to shopping malls, demands blind obedience
while advertising meaningless choice. You hear about Coke vs Pepsi,
work vs unemployment or Bush vs Dukakis but the real message is
work or starve, wear Nike or be cast-out, and find a boy/girlfriend
or die. Those who join the system as managers, journalists, spies,
or professors, have joined the dictatorship of lies that envelops
everyone today. They lack even the slight room to maneuver of
ten years ago. They are simpering slaves to both the unwritten
rules of fashion and the unquestionable rules of bureaucracy/"democracy."

Total War

Today's puppets are bruised and bloodied from having their strings
pulled hard and often. The TV watchers are in a state of shock.
Once Hussein invaded Kuwait, the spectacle began a modern version
of total war. It attacked everywhere and grabbed everyone by the
collar at once.

The vast, interlocking structures of the military, government,
and media are backed up by an equally vast system of self-deception
and selective amnesia. Most people are already numb from the small
doses of deception involved in daily life. `I'll get that promotion.
If I looked more like a model he'd never cheat on me. This jacket
will make me popular. I'll retire early.' When you work ten-
or twelve-hour days to keep up your life-style, you need constant
distraction to prevent your misery from being obvious to yourself.
You are ready to accept easy answers which prove that you are
not making any mistakes.

The magic hold exerted by the spectacle comes from the absence
of any alternatives. The system is invisible since it hides in
plain view. Only those who look at the spectacle's stranglehold
on daily life can see the logic of its world management system.
Our lives, in this peaceful, democratic world, are controlled
by the unexplained forces of progress, fashion, sex appeal, and
the economy. Most of us are over-stressed from the work needed
simply to survive.

It is easy to see that we accept a war created by accountants
when our own lives are moved by these same absurd forces. From
everyday routine, it is easy to see why government must constantly
manufacture enemies. The system constantly crushes the global
working class. These people gain nothing from this dying system.

The system hides its total logic a little more deeply. The economy
today rules with a remote-control iron hand. The system is based
on us selling our lives at work so that we can buy back our survival.
We can hide our misery in the simulation of life offered by commodities,
sold at malls or elsewhere. The system is now so unstable that
it must extract more work out of us while demanding that we become
more stupid.

War of Mirrors

"The justifications given for being in Saudi Arabia wouldn't
convince an eight-year-old for five minutes." [Noam Chomsky]
The war was a kind of festival of deception. Everyone sat glued
to the TV while CNN pumped out rumors from Washington that were
contradicted within the hour.

The gulf war propaganda demanded submission for the sake of stupidity.
One poll said that most Americans preferred even more extreme
press censorship than the almost complete censorship that existed.
Those still confused enough to answer a poll were naturally willing
to accept the media's own empty logic. TV was saying that more
lies would mean more support for the war. More support wins the
war. Stupidity is patriotic.

The war was nothing but a way to continue social peace by other
means. Submission to absurd authorities was maintained by making
it more extreme. From the savings and loan crisis to the sleep
deficit of most workers, the need for misdirection was increasing
exponentially.

The Iraqi army was a kind of modern poltergeist. It appeared and
disappeared many times during the course of the five month television
seance. "Hussein's million man army" finally vanished
from Kuwait without a trace. The infantry personnel that arrived
were as surprised as anyone that there were no "huge sand
fortifications" but just a few conscripts behind barbed wire.

The spectacle proved one of its pet theories: in the invasion
of Kuwait, control of information counted for even more than control
of the air. But this is only in a world where the spectacle already
reigned supreme.

Confessed lies existed only to conceal other lies. The Pentagon
talks about using the press as a tool against Hussein, to give
Hussein an incorrect idea of U.S. attack plans. But this conceals
that the main aim of military propaganda was to give the impression
that the Iraqi army existed at all, to turn the ensuing slaughter
into a fight between adversaries.

During the "dirty war" in Argentina in the 1970s, young
people were picked up by the police, often at random. They were
tortured until they confessed to various "crimes" and
only then executed. Some who refused to confess were even let
go. The object was to demonstrate the police state's ability to
destroy the individual.

Despite the size of the Iraqi army on paper, Iraq could not fight
modern warfare. Modern warfare is based on a conveyor belt system
from factory to front line. The Iraqi army fell apart quickly
because its many weapons were just second-rate gizmos sold by
Russia for a quick buck. It had no real war machine since it had
no independent economy. Its supply lines were cut by the embargo
long before the war began. Saddam, having always been a puppet,
was then a puppet with his strings cut.

The ground war was launched the day Iraq announced that it would
withdraw from Kuwait. (G.I.'s have reported that the ground invasion
began one day before the media was told. Bush's ultimatum to Hussein
was thus a total fiction but only one of many fictions of the
war.) It was launched not only to prevent peace but also because
Hussein had to be shown as defeated. His withdrawal offer had
demoralized the confused hopes of the Arabs. Since he had demonstrated
his cowardice, he was no longer needed on the spectacle's stage.

One final product of the Iraq/Kuwait fix, bombing the oil wells
to destroy the oil, was a natural result of the way the war had
to be fought. Since the Iraqi army was utterly outmatched by the
U.S. from the beginning, Hussein took steps to withdraw from Kuwait.
But he falsely assumed that the U.S. would avoid attacking and
burning the oil fields. So he gave himself a little room to maneuver.
But Bush went the extra mile to get war, invading exactly as soon
as Hussein announced he was leaving.

By concealing its motives from everyone, the U.S. wound up with
the military victory and the ecological holocaust of oil fires
that it needed.

Traffic jams have become the latest form of massacre. In America,
many people spend years of their lives in traffic while losing
more than time off their lives from the tension. During the ground
invasion, the Iraqi army collapsed, and 50,000 to 100,000 soldiers
fled Kuwait in any kind of vehicle they could find. We will never
find out exactly how many Iraqis were massacred during the escape
from Kuwait.

The system practices an endless scorched earth policy from Iraq
to suburbia. The media has gone farther and farther in demanding
this submission.

Our only alternative today is to attack the whole system that
brings us both war and peace. We must begin at the point of destroying
both wage labor and the spectacle before the capitalist system
destroys us in the next world traffic jam.